Alexander Solzhenitsyn, world-builder · 7:49pm Feb 25th, 2018
If you want to create a strange world in little space, you could do worse than study "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."
Solzhenitsyn was describing a real world, of course: the world of Stalin's gulags, forced-labor camps for political prisoners. But it was a world the average Soviet citizen hadn't imagined and probably wouldn't want to. He couldn't count on a shared cultural understanding between himself and his audience. So he had to build that world up in his story and he had to do it very deliberately, the way a genre author would build a fantasy world or alien culture.
How does he do this? Well, let's start with what he doesn't do.
He doesn't start with an introduction explaining why the prison camp is there, or what Ivan Denisovich Shukov did to get put in it. Instead Sozhenitsyn follows the old genre dictum "Start your reader off at the bottom of a well at midnight in a thunderstorm--and don't tell him." In fact he follows it literally:
At five o'clock that morning reveille was sounded, as usual, by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff headquarters. The intermittent sounds barely penetrated the windowpanes on which the frost lay two fingers thick, and they ended almost as soon as they'd begun. It was cold outside, and the campguard was reluctant to go on beating out the reveille for long.
There you are: darkness, confinement and bad weather.
Solzhenitsyn also doesn't bother with backstory, at least not beyond what's necessary to illuminate the present moment. We know that Shukov has a wife only because the guards tell him to mop the floor like he's seen his wife do, and he pleads that he can't remember because it's been so long since he's seen her. When a fellow-prisoner opens a parcel of food sent from his family, we learn Shukov has children because he's written to his wife not to send him food parcels: he doesn't want it taken out of the kids' mouths.
There's no virtue-signaling, as we might expect from an American author.There are no long-winded speeches, as we might expect from a Russian one. Solzhenitsyn's decision to hew to the three dramatic unities probably helped keep him focused.But it isn't as if he's not making a speech, and a virtuous one: his story is "speaking truth to power" and he wants that truth to strike home and sink deep, like an arrow. That’s the purpose of his story and of the world it creates .
To make that arrow fly true, he has to strip it of every bit of weight or drag possible, keeping only what's essential. So what’s essential?
What’s essential to “One Day in the Life” is imagery. Both the world it builds and the moral argument it makes are gradually built up in the reader's mind from carefully-observed, concisely-limned images. Images like the reveille in that very first line of the story: not a stirring bugle or a cheery bell but the brutal blows of a hammer on obdurate steel (making mock of the old Soviet honorific trudarnik). Then in the next sentence, the frost two fingers deep, which in its juxtaposition of frost and fingers makes you feel as if you're touching the cold itself. Then in the final sentence the indolence of the guards, doing a half-assed job while the prisoners freeze their asses off.
The whole story goes on like this, building up the world of the gulags with its zeks and its guards and its endless labors through image after image. Images of cold (the frozen ground, the creaking of footsteps in snow), images of hunger (the tiny fish in the morning stew, sucked clean to bare skeletons by each zek) , images of irksome rivalries and sycophancies and fears like you'd find in a Dilbert strip (the filched bowl of oats, the concealed bit of hacksaw blade--Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies!), only here the stakes are life and death.
This is the world of the gulags, and he doesn't just make you see and hear it, he makes you feel it. But only the what of it, not the why. On that point Solzhenitsyn keeps the reader hungry for more--performer's trick, extended metaphor and invitation to dialectic, all in one. This he would later supply in The Gulag Archipelago which, as the title implied, would explore the world of Stalin's prison camps as one would a strange and savage land--
...that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent — an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people.
In a way the Gulag is to "One Day in the Life" as The Lord of the Rings is to The Hobbit: a chance to unfold at greater length the world first introduced in a shorter work. If that comparison makes you wince, remember that Tolkien, too, was inspired by a strange and savage world--the world of Grendel and spear-play and burning meadhalls--on which he also sought a humane perspective.
So what do we learn about world-building from "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich?" In reverse order of importance I'd say the lessons are:
4) "Show, don't tell" isn't quite right: rather, see before tell and feel before see.
3) Let the feeling or seeing be done by an appropriate POV character, and let it unfold naturally through the course of events.
2) Let those events, and what is seen and felt of them, be just enough to describe just enough of the world as is necessary at the moment.
1) What's necessary is defined, not by the glories or terrors of the world you create, but by your reason for creating it.
You may not be trying to right a wrong or bear witness to monumental suffering, but something must move you to attempt all this work. Figure that out and it will guide you in all the decisions of this not that which a writer has to make.
Finally:
0) Don't discuss literary theory in front of anyone who may someday put you in a story:
"No, my friend," Tsezar was saying in a gentle, casual way. "If one is to be objective one must acknowledge that Eisenstein is a genius. Ivan the Terrible, isn't that a work of genius? The dance of Ivan's guards, the masked oprichniki! The scene in the cathedral!"
"Ham!" said X123 angrily "It's all so arty there's no art left in it...A mockery of the memory of three generations of Russian intelligentsia!"
Shukhov cleared his throat. He hadn't the nerve to interrupt such a learned conversation.
"But listen," [Tsezar] resumed "Art isn't a matter of what but of how."
X123 struck the table. "To hell with your 'how' if it doesn't arouse any worthwile feeling in me!"
...Shukhov turned on his heel and went quietly out. The cold was bearable, he decided.
I'm so glad you brought this story up, because it's a really good one. The descriptions of the camp life -- cold, hunger, hard work, everyone from the prisoners to the head guards trying to finagle some benefits from the state apparatus any way they can, and so on -- paint a truly dystopic image of some of the worst parts of Stalin's Soviet Union. And yet, for all of its incredibly bleak subject matter and setting, it's not a bleak story. Not only is the prisoners' society painted with great and deft richness, Solzhenitsyn manages to put the reader so well inside Ivan Denisovich's skin, that you live along in his fears and worries, and come to appreciate his little triumphs, like getting an extra bowl of thin watery oatmeal. ("Oatmeal? Are you crazy?!"
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As someone who has been cornered many times by people intent on explaining the entire history, geography, biology, politics, and ethnography of the world(s) they have created as a setting for their as yet unwritten fantasy epic, I intend to sharpen this blog post to a fine point and use it as a weapon on the next... explainer.
Now you're going to make me take another stab at Gulag, which I have in my bathroom for the last few years as a "Maybe I can slog my way through part of it now.... nope" book.
Fifty-seventh time is the charm!
"I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it." --The Gulag Archipelago
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If it was my experience I'd call it bleak. Though the deft richness of prose does fill well an empty and hurting stomach.
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The memories of dead men and women thank you for your slogging, Georg.